Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Get a load of -- and try to keep track of -- the twisted family trees presented in these songs.

Let's start with this Spoke Jones soap opera send-up in the 1940s: "None but the Lonely Heart (A Soaperetta)"

Reverend Beat-Man, Supreme Commander and President for Life of Switzerland's Voodoo Rhythm Records, describes an even more convoluted -- and degenerate -- family in "I See the Light" from his album Surreal Folk Blues Gospel Trash Vol. 2

Finally, here's the grandfather of all such songs, as performed by Louis Marshall "Grandpa" Jones .

Originally recorded by Oscar and Lorenzo in 1947, the song, according to this item in Ancestry.com actually is based on a true story originally published in the early 1880s.

Thursday, August 25, 2016

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New MexicanAug. 26, 2016Indulge me in belaboring the obvious for a moment: Memphis, Tennessee, is an important city in rock ’n’roll. But that didn’t stop with Elvis, Sun Records, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, Al Green, Stax Records, or Chuck Berry’s uncle writing messages on the wall.

Memphis is still an important city for rock. For years it’s been home to a vibrant “underground” rock scene, thanks largely to Goner Records (the store and the label), an associated festival called Gonerfest (coming up in late September), and bands including The Reatards, The Oblivians, and all of their offshoots.

My favorite group to emerge from this Memphis stew in recent months isNots, an all-female punk band whose screaming new album Cosmetic is a wild delight.

This is the most urgent-sounding music I’ve heard in a long time. Though it’s not always easy to understand the lyrics, it’s impossible to escape the intensity of the sound. Drummer Charlotte Watson deserves much of the credit for this. For the first few seconds of “Rat King” and “Cold Line,” she almost sounds like a hopped-up surf-band drummer ready to explode.

Nots really stretch out on a couple of tracks on Cosmetic. The five-and-a-half-minute title song begins with what might be described as a distorted blues riff. It starts off slow, but about three minutes in, the pace suddenly takes off and becomes a frenzied race to the finish.

Even better is the seven-minute closing song “Entertain Me.” In a recent interview with Stereogum, Hoffman said the lyrics deal with “the grotesque horror show going on in American politics and how they are portrayed — the rise of Trump, the reality-TV-like nature of American news, the almost-forced compliance of the viewer. ...” Indeed, this is entertainment!

Cosmetic will be available September 9.

Gøggsby Gøggs. A lot of people are referring to this as Ty Segall’s latest band, but actually it’s a collaboration among Segall, Chris Shaw of Ex-Cult — a Memphis band of which Nots’ Hoffman was a member — and Charles Moothart from Fuzz, another Segall group. Shaw handles lead vocals — he’s a shouter more than a singer — while Segall concentrates on guitar, though he and drummer Moothart switch instruments on a few tracks.

It’s hard to tell what you’re going to get with each new release from the prolific, restless Segall — the Stooges-like craziness of Slaughterhouse, mellow introspection like Sleeper, or the soul-tinged, almost-poppy fare like Manipulator. Gøggs is closer to Slaughterhouse, or whatever Segall was up to when he raged at High Mayhem in Santa Fe a few years ago. It’s loud, rough, raw, and noisy. And yet it’s a friendly-sounding assault — it’s the sheer fun Segall, Shaw, and Moothart seem to be having as they pound out these 10 tunes.

Highlights here include the harsh, hard-hitting “Assassinate the Doctor” (perhaps inspired by “Fearless Doctor Killers,” Mudhoney’s protest against “pro-life” violence); the riff-heavy garage-punker “Smoke the Wurm”; and “Final Notice,” which features insane screaming and, like the Nots’ record, is driven by crazy keyboards.

* Swing Cremona byPierre Omer’s Swing Review. Omer used to be in a Swiss group called The Dead Brothers, who billed themselves as a “funeral band.” And indeed, there was something spooky and a little morbid about that group. But Omer’s latest band is much more upbeat.

This music is closer in sound to groups like the Squirrel Nut Zippers. They play a little hot jazz, a little vaudeville, a hint of calypso, a whiff of klezmer, and more than a touch of Weimar Republic decadence. It’s a four-piece band (guitar, stand-up bass, drums, and trumpet). But it sounds much bigger than it is.

Probably my favorite song here is “International Man of Mystery,” which makes me wish that Cab Calloway would return from the dead to sing in it and that Max Fleischer would come back and do a cartoon for it. Omer’s music spans the globe. He plays a “Russian Lullaby,” goes tropical with “Coconut Island” — try to listen to this all the way through without hearing Leon Redbone singing along — and strips “Misirlou” of any trace of surf music, taking the song back to its Middle Eastern roots (the way Dick Dale discovered it).

And speaking of Max Fleischer, the famed animator did a Betty Boop cartoon of “Mysterious Mose,” which is a variation of another song on Omer’s album, “Ol’ Man Mose.” That song, attributed to Louis Armstrong, has a rich history. A 1938 version of the song by Patricia Norman with the Eddie Duchin Orchestra is notorious for featuring the repeated use of a certain dirty word — in the refrain that goes “Mose kicked the bucket ...” Omer resists the temptation to work blue, however, so you can safely play his version for the children.

* San Antonio Kid by San Antonio Kid. This is a German group that has a strange obsession with the American Southwest. SAK plays an alluring, moody, noirish spaghetti-Western style of country rock. (Maybe we should coin a new category: sauerkraut Western?) There’s lots of twang and reverb and dreamy melodies packed into this 34-minute, eight-song record.

The whistling that opens the song “Strangers” sounds straight out of Clint Eastwood’s A Fistful of Dollars. San Antonio Kid reminds me a little of Calexico — without the marimbas and trumpet. And the harmonica on “Same Old Sound II” has echoes of Call of the West-era Wall of Voodoo.

We only hail the hero from whom we got our nameWe're not sure what he did but he's our hero just the samefrom "The John Birch Society" by Michael Brown

Seventy one years ago today, just days after the end of World War II, a group of Chinese communists captured then killed a 27-year-old American Baptist missionary -- who also was working for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services -- named John Birch.

Birch, who spoke fluent Mandarin, had been sent, along with a group of Chinese Nationalist and American officers to accept the surrender of a Japanese base in eastern China.

According to a review in the Wall Street Journal review of the biography John Birch: A Life by Terry Lautz (2016, Oxford University Press) Richard Bernstein talked about Birch's career in China:

Birch bravely spent weeks and months at a time behind enemy lines helping to select targets for American bombers. After the Japanese surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, he was sent on a mission to scout territories in eastern China being evacuated by the Japanese. There, he and his men ran into a detachment of Communist guerrillas who, after a heated verbal exchange, shot and killed Birch. The date was Aug. 25, 1945.
He was a missionary. He was an officer in the OSS. But one thing John Birch never was: a member of The John Birch Society.

In this book review, Bernstein wrote about what happened to Birch's name after his death:

As a devout Christian, Birch would have found Communist values and practices deeply objectionable, but he didn’t live to witness Communist rule in China and was never an anti-communist fanatic. Yet in 1958, Robert H.W. Welch Jr., a wealthy candy manufacturer, founded the John Birch Society, seizing on the notion that the noble American war hero Birch was the first victim of a war declared against America and Christian civilization by the international Communist conspiracy. This was a war aided and abetted, in Welch’s post-McCarthyite view, by a coterie of highly placed American traitors. Dwight Eisenhower, he wrote, was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy ... his untimely death [was] followed by his involuntary enlistment in a paranoid club that reduced a cause that might otherwise have gained his sympathy to a jokey kind of historical footnote.

Indeed, in the world of popular music you only hear Birch's name in a couple of jokey songs -- jokey folkie songs -- from the early 1960s.

Those songs are below. But remember when listening to them that the John Birch Society is not John Birch.

First there's "The John Birch Society," as performed by The Chad Mitchell Trio.

Then there is Bob Dylan's "Talkin' John Birch Society Blues."

Ironically, this song proved that paranoia was not the exclusive property of the Birchers. Dylan was going to sing this on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1963,

Dylan had auditioned “John Birch” days earlier and had run through it for Ed Sullivan himself without any concern being raised. But during dress rehearsal on the day of the show, an executive from the CBS Standards and Practices department informed the show’s producers that they could not allow Dylan to go forward singing “John Birch.” While many of the song’s lyrics about hunting down “reds” were merely humorous ... others that equated the John Birch Society’s views with those of Adolf Hitler raised the fear of a defamation lawsuit in the minds of CBS’s lawyers.

Dylan refused to alter the lyrics or play another song. So he gave up his chance to appear on Ed Sullivan. Sullivan himself later denounced the idiotic decision by the CBS suits.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Leon Payne, the blind bard of Alba, Texas, is best known for writing the Hank Williams hit "Lost Highway." Personally, I think he should be remembered more for "Take Me" by George Jones or "Selfishness of Man," a gut-puncher recorded by Jones, Bobby Osborne, Buddy and Julie Miller and others.

But neither of those are the Leon Payne song I want to talk about today. I want to talk about one that has always seemed to be somewhat out of character for Leon.

"Psycho"!

I first hear this tune at Cafe Oasis in the early '90s, the first time I saw ex-Angry Samoan Gregg Turner play. It's a perfect song for Turner, a pretty tune full of black humor and strange plot twists. I assumed he'd written it. But he told me it was the work of "some old country guy" and that Elvis Costello had recorded it.

Actually a couple of old country guys recorded it -- first Eddie Noack back in the late '60s. He was a friend of Payne's. Then a Michigan singer named Jack Kittell in the early '70s. Costello didn't get to it until the early 80s during his Almost Blue period. (It can be found as a bonus on at least one version of Almost Blue.)

Here's Noack's version, followed by Costello's:

And many others followed. As Randy Fox wrote in Nashville Scene in 2012, "Psycho" became "a favorite cover song for many alt-country bands that skew to the weirder and darker side of country. Thus proving a great country song will always find its audience, once the world gets weird enough."

In his "Psycho" article Fox interviewed Payne's daughter Myrtie Le Payne, who told how her dad came up with this macabre song.

"Jackie White was my daddy's steel guitar player," [ Myrtie Le] says. "He started working with him in 1968, and the song came out of a conversation they had one day."

Fans of "Psycho" should recognize that name:

I saw my ex again last night mama / She was at the dance at Miller's store / She was with that Jackie White mama / I killed them both and now they're buried under Jenkins' sycamore

Fox wrote, "According to the story related by White, in the spring of 1968, he and Leon Payne were discussing the Richard Speck murders. Speck murdered eight student nurses in Chicago in July 1966 and was convicted and sentenced to death the following year. Being a history buff, Payne was familiar with the cases of many notorious mass killers, and the discussion soon turned to other famous cases — Charles Whitman, Ed Gein, Mary Bell and Albert Fish. That conversation directly inspired the song."

According to this, the opening line, "Can Mary fry some fish, Mama?" is a sly reference to Mary Bell, a child killer who was a child herself. Her life story makes me wonder whether she's the inspiration for Nick Cave's "The Curse of Milhaven."

Indeed, "Psycho" was an unusual song for Leon Payne. But maybe the seeds of it came from an earlier song, one I mentioned above, "Selfishness in Man":

Little children painting pictures of the birds and apple trees / Oh, why can't the grown up people have the faith of one of these / And to think those tiny fingers might become a killer's hand ...

You think that's psycho, don't you ...

Any way, here are a couple of more versions of "Psycho," first by an Australian band called The Beasts of Bourbon

And here's a fairly recent one I like a lot by another Australian, Mojo Juju

And here are more, including covers by Jack Kittel, T. Tex Edwards, Andre William & The Sadies, and more. Sorry, I couldn't find a Gregg Turner version anywhere.

It's honky-tonk time at the Big Enchilada, so come on in for a brand new hillbilly episode. You'll hear country music, old and new; songs of joy and songs of shame; songs touched by the Lord and songs scorched by the Devil's hellfire ... As my friend, the late, great Kell Robertson used to say, come on in, it's cool and dark inside!

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Tomorrow marks the 121st anniversary of the killing of John Wesley Hardin, a true bad-ass Old West gunslinger. He was a cowboy, a fighter against reconstruction and an actual jailhouse lawyer who studied law while serving time for killing a sheriff's deputy in Brown County, Texas. He claimed to have backed down Wild Bill Hickok, who was sheriff of Abilene.

He was shot and killed in the Acme Saloon (no, this wasn't a Roadrunner cartoon) in El Paso on Aug. 19. 1895. Killed by a guy he'd previously hired to kill the husband of his girlfriend.

Hardin, the son of a Methodist preacher, claimed to have killed more than 40 people (though only 27 were confirmed.) One of his victims was a friend he killed for snoring.

Hardin was an unusual type of killer, a handsome, gentlemanly man who considered himself a pillar of society, always maintaining that he never killed anyone who did not need killing and that he always shot to save his own life. Many people who knew him or his family regarded him as a man more sinned against than sinning.

Or as Bob Dylan might say, "he was never known to hurt an honest man."

Actually Dylan did say that in a song titled "John Wesley Harding." Dylan added a "g" to the outlaw's name and basically turned him into Robin Hood, a "friend to the poor" who "was always known to lend a helping hand." Though the hero of Dylan's 1967 song bore little resemblance to the real Hardin, it's still a fine little tune.

You can play it here:

But about eight years before Dylan's song, a hillbilly named Jimmie Skinner did a slightly more historically accurate account of Hardin's life. For example, the song correctly says Hardin "shot a man dead at the age of 15" and it does have him going to prison for killing a law enforcement officer (though in real life, Hardin was pardoned after serving 16 years of his 25 year sentence for kiling Deputy Charles Webb.)

If that melody sounds familiar, that's because Webb lifted it from another outlaw song, "John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man," recorded in 1928 by The Carter Family (and a million others after them and a few before them). John Hardy was completed unrelated to John Wesley Hardin. Hardy was a black man who was hanged for murder in 1894 in West Virginia. He'd killed another guy in a craps game. (Holy Stag-o-lee, Batman!)

Finally, I'm not sure what this last song is about. Maybe the singer who called himself John Wesley Harding. On;y Wesley Willis knows for sure and he's not talking anymore.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Ninety seven years ago today, Aug. 11, 1919, Germany adopted a constitution hammered out in the city of Weimar, creating a representative democracy for the country.

The new government for the next 14 years would be unofficially known as The Weimar Republic.

The Weimar Republic era wasn't an easy time for Germany, which faced hyper-inflation, crushing debt, depression and and the rise of National Socialism.

But culturally, the '20s truly roared in the Weimar Republic,

It was the age of the cabaret in which art, theater, music and cinema thrived.

In honor of the Weimar constitution, here are a few samples of popular German music of that era.

Let's start with big, bawdy Berlin Singer Claire Waldoff,

Here's Harry Jackson's Tanz Orchestra. I'm not sure why the YouTube poster called it "Gay Jazz." But whether or not Jackson himself was gay, Weimar-era cabaret culture was quite progressive in accepting gays and lesbians.

Adolf Ginsburg's Orchestra performs "I Found a Million Dollar Baby"

Finally here is Lotte Lenya singing "Seeräuber Jenny" in the film version of The Three Penny Opera. Her husband was Kurt Weill, who composed the music for the play. Lenya was in the original 1928 Berlin stage production of the play.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Here is a bunch of songs by TV stars who probably wish they'd never sung them.

Let's start with Burt Ward, who portrayed Robin on Batman in the mid '60s. The song "Boy Wonder I Love You" is fairly typical '60s teen idol dreck. But it's teen idol dreck written and arranged by Frank Zappa! Plus, some of Zappa's original Mothers of Invention, including my late pal Jimmy Carl Black, played on the record.

They had incredibly long, scraggly hair, and clothes that appeared not to have been washed in this century if ever. These were musicians who became famous for tearing up furniture, their speakers, their microphones and even their expensive guitars onstage. They were maniacs!... Their fearless leader and king of grubbiness was the late Frank Zappa. (The full name of the band was Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.) After recording with me, Frank became an internationally recognized cult superstar, which was understandable; after working with me, the only place Frank could go was up.

The following video proves him right

Perhaps the greatest TV news anchor to never exist was Ted Baxter, portrayed on The Mary Tyler Moore Show by Ted Knight. Here's an ode from Ted to another television journalist Barbara Walters from his 1975 novelty album Hi Guys. I'm still searching for the restraining order Walters surely filed after hearing this.

And in this clip from NBC's Hullabaloo, (a music show I watched back in the mid '60s even though it was hopelessly inferior to ABC's Shindig) Michael Landon -- Little Joe on Bonanza -- does the Freddie with Peter & Gordon

Thursday, August 04, 2016

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican Aug. 5, 2016

Decades before the issue of musicians “selling out” and shilling for corporate products became a subject of serious handwringing among the deep thinkers of rock ’n’ roll, Southern flour mills were bankrolling radio shows that popularized their products as well as major country and blues artists.

The Martha White company was sponsoring The Grand Ole Opry — with a cool jingle by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs — while King Biscuit Flour was bankrolling Sonny Boy Williamson’s radio show in Helena, Arkansas.

Even Hank Williams had a corporate sugar daddy — or more accurately a flour daddy — in a Decatur, Alabama, mill called Mother’s Best Flour Company.

In 1951, the company sponsored a weekday morning at WSM in Nashville starring Hank and his Drifting Cowboys. More than 15 hours of these shows are available on a 15-CD box set called The Complete Mother’s Best Collection ... Plus! reissued last month in different packaging than the original 2010 edition.

Here you’ll hear Hank and his band singing songs, cutting up between numbers and sometimes even screwing up. At one point Hank says he’s going to perform “I Saw the Light” but instead starts singing a different song. Hank stops the song, saying “Now which one am I singing? I wrote so many of ’em to the same tune I don’t know which one I’m started off on …”

You’ll hear Hank singing some of his best-known hits — there are three different versions of “Move it On Over,” four of “Cold, Cold Heart,” etc. — novelty songs, cover songs, a plethora of gospel songs, instrumentals by the Drifting Cowboys — and 30-some songs by Miss Audrey.

Mr. and Mrs. Hank Williams

Ah, Miss Audrey!

Audrey Williams was a beautiful woman and a muse for some of her husband’s greatest songs. (She divorced Williams in 1952.) But she had a voice that could peel paint. I wonder how many sales of Mother’s Best Flour were lost by music lovers turning the dial when her off-key voice came over the airwaves.

She does some dandy humorous songs like “Four Flusher” and “Model T Love.” June Carter would have killed with these songs. But Audrey just made them painful. They should have let Big Bill Lister, Hank’s rhythm guitarist and opening act, do these numbers. (Lister has only one solo track here, a funny talking song called “Foolish Questions.”)

My favorite songs here are Hank’s versions of country classics made famous by others. Among these are Moon Mullican’s “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone,” Roy Acuff’s “Low and Lonely,” Bob Nolan’s “Cool Water,” and a Fred Rose song Willie Nelson made famous more than 20 years after Hank died, “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain.”

Hank’s version has a verse that Willie didn’t use, probably because it didn’t fit in with the story he was telling on his album Red Headed Stranger:

“Now my hair has turned to silver/All my life I’ve loved in vain/I can see her star in heaven/Blue eyes cryin’ in the rain.”

Trouble ahead, lady in red

There’s a genuine Hank Williams oddity here. “Stars in Her Eyes” is a 14-minute musical melodrama about venereal disease in which Hank narrates and sings little snippets.

This wasn’t sponsored by Mother’s Best. It was a part of a U.S. Public Health Service project to reach Southerners about the dangers of VD. None other than the renowned folklorist Alan Lomax helped the government line up singers like Roy Acuff, Woody Guthrie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and, yes, Hank Williams, to star in musical public service announcements. (There is a cool podcast by WNYC about that HERE.)

Hank’s contribution to this effort was the story of Joe and Lena, a young couple. He goes through their entire tedious courtship and their marriage, aided by a handful of uncredited actors who sound like rejects from radio soap operas. The woman who plays Lena is especially overwrought.

My favorite part is the last scene in which Lena begs forgiveness for giving Joe the clap. Joe gives a classic 1950s manly reply: “Let’s not talk about it. Not now. Not ever.”

At the recommended retail price of $129, it’s fair to say this box set is for Hank Williams completists only. And there are problems beyond the hefty price tag.

The introductions and closings of all the individual programs — there are nearly three hours of these when you add them up — are extremely repetitive. And so are the plugs for Mother’s Best that follow nearly every song. While charming at first, these start getting old fairly quickly.

Despite these flaws, this box set will give a listener a deeper insight into the personality and the musical grasp of one of the true giants of American music.

For those who just want the music, there was a fantastic 2008 three-disc box called The Unreleased Recordings that features 55 Hank songs — just the songs, and no Audrey solos — from the Mother’s Best sessions. It’s out of print, but you can find it for a reasonable price online.

Robbie Fulks in Los Alamos: It was only a few weeks ago in this very column that I was raving about Robbie Fulks’ latest record, his “seemingly subdued, but actually powerful acoustic album Upland Stories,” and how 20 years after his recording debut, Fulks continues to grow as an artist.

You can see for yourself whether I was correct. Fulks is playing at 7 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 5, at Ashley Pond in Los Alamos as part of Russ Gordon’s free summer concert series. Yes, I said free! Bring your own lawn chairs.

Until very recently I believed that Helen Kane was the actual voice of Betty Boop.

But just a couple of months ago after writing a column about Cyndi Lauper, a diligent editor showed me the error of my ways. (Thanks, Molly B!)

So no, Helen Kane was not Betty Boop. But when you listen to her songs, you can see how one can make that assumption.

Kane was born Helen Claire Schroeder Aug. 4, 1904 in the Bronx. She started her entertainment career in Vaudeville and by the late 1920s she was making records as well as movies.

And yes, her "boop boop a doop" had become her trademark by this time.

Betty Boop didn't make her debut until 1930. Her face resembled Kane's. But even more so, Betty's voice (provided through the years by at least three actresses, Margie Hine, Mae Questel and Bonnie Poe) resembled Kane's

Cane sued Max Fleischer Studios in 1932, claiming the company had appropriated her vocal style. The case dragged on for more than two years and eventually Kane lost.

We all love Betty Boop but Kane, who died in 1966, deserves love too.

So let's celebrate her music on her 112th birthday.

Cyndi Lauper made this song famous.

But the first song of Kane's I ever heard was this one.

And here's where I first heard that song:

And for those who really want to Boop out, here's a collection of her songs from the Internet Archive

Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Neill Kirby McMillan, Jr., better known in the free world as Mojo Nixon turned 59 years old yesterday.

Happy birthday, Mojo!

Mojo doesn't perform music that much these days. For the past several years he's done a weekday radio show called The Loon in the Afternoon for Sirus XM's Outlaw Country station.

But his songs are immortal.

Though he's best known for such classics as "Don Henley Must Die," "Debbie Gibson is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child," and of course "Elvis is Everywhere" -- the song that made me a lifelong fan -- today I honor Mojo with a bunch of less familiar songs.

Let's start with this clip from 1989 -- which was around the first time I ever heard Mojo live -- Here he sounds like a one-man redneck Velvet Underground.

Truly he was the King of Sleaze.

From the early '90s, Mojo & The Toadlickers sing "Poontango"

Here is a live performance from earlier this year in which Mojo discusses current events and politics. I can hear the influence of Wesley Willis in this one.

And speaking of politics, back in 1990, Mojo was a guest on CNN's Crossfire where he did battle with Pat Buchanan (who used to work for another Nixon) and some Junior League Tipper Gore over the evils of rock 'n' roll and the need for mandatory labeling of dirty, perverted, violent, Satanic records.

(If you're a masochist, the rest of Mojo's Crossfire appearance can be found HERE and HERE.

Big Enchilada Souvenirs

Just So Ya Know ...

This site is a personal publication independent of my professional capacity at the Santa Fe New Mexican.The views expressed here are not necessarily those of The Santa Fe New Mexican or santafenewmexican.com (Same goes for KSFR. Don't blame them for anything weird I might post here.)